Ham Radio and Jeeping in Arizona

Today I went southwest of town and threw a dipole up in a saguro cactus and made some contacts. I used the Icom IC-7000 at 1oo watts and a 100ah SLA battery to a multiband dipole up about 12 feet. Being 1000 feet above the desert floor against the northeast facing side of the hill really helped my signal get out. The Virgin Islands, and Caribbean as well as 22 states in about 2 hours. Mostly 59 reports and I had quite a little pile up there for a while. Thanks to all you guys and gal, who worked me Catcus Portable. I will surely do it again soon. 73

Another Ragnar Relay is in the books. It was colder up there than last year but the rain held off. The runners seemed to have better costumes this year and so did some of the hams!  Kudos to Brad, Virgil and Marcia for the great hot breakfast! Our prayers go out the family of the runner involved in an accident.
Sorry I did not get pictures from all the exchanges.

Not just any Tom, W5TOM Tom. He told me of contacts using a 9 volt battery. Pretty Cool!  He is a super nice guy and his website is outragous! He must have spent many hours on it and it is well worthy of a look.

I talked to Carl, KB7BIE with his 40 meter ham stick and 100 watts! He was doing a great job.

I had the pleasure of working Doug, N0AGE in Iowa last night. He was running 1500 watts with a IC7700. He was solid 10 over 9 most of the time. The contact before him was another op named Doug in Iowa as well, KC0ZNK…what are the odds of that? LOL
Gotta love Ham Radio!

What a beautiful rig!

I worked some guys in Kansas on 20 tonight. They were training new hams and working storm spotters. The station below is N0OY. I would say that is a pretty good classroom! Hope to work you again Pete and Tanner.

Today Virgil and I took a last minute afternoon run up to Mt. Ord to check access to the repeater site. Nice and slippery up there and colder than I thought it would be. A tree blocked the road that we had to move. Other than that, there were only a few white knuckle moments. At the top we worked a handful of guys on simplex.

This afternoon, after work I made a few cool contacts on 20. First was K6ABC, Rob. He has a sweet place in Cali. with a nice solar set up. Check his profile on QRZ. Scroll down for the pics.

Next was VE7RSV/P7 on an island (Stone Island?) on the Canadian west coast. 100 Watts on a G5RV. Only he and one other person on the island. They were there for work of some kind, I really did not get that part but a great 100 watt contact non the less. I was wishing I was playing radio from a nice remote island in the pacific northwest.

Then I struggled to copy KJ6DJL at S1 with a S2 noise floor, and in the 5 mins. we talked he went up to an S9 so the band was really weird along the greyline. He was a ham in the 50’s and just got back into it, so that was cool. He too was a 100 watt contact. He was on a vertical and was not using ground wires, but he was getting out well.

Later after dinner, I worked KD7UDG Vince in Billings MT. The band was wavy but we held it together for a good log time. Nice to meet ya Vince!
73,
Randy

W0BNY

W0BNY – David in North Dakota
Wacky people you meet on ham radio. He made a cool homebrew hexbeam.

I was bummed that the recent jeep trip was cancelled due to the heavy rains here in Arizona. The next day these pictures were posted on a local jeep site.

Sad Jeeper

Sunk Jeep